Does this look infected to you?

Yesterday Elise woke up with Croup. We are very familiar with this wheezing, barking monster but this is the first time it has hit Elise. She cleared up quite well after a spell on the front porch. That sounds pretty southern, doesn't it? Setting on the front porch for a spell with the little one, her on my lap wheezing away next to the azalea bush.

So I kept her home from school and she spent the day with me, happy as a clam, no sign of croup. We had a great time together, going for coffee, grocery shopping, hanging out in the front yard, saying hi to the mailman. She told anyone who would listen that she was "a little bit sick". A little bit loco is more like it. Maybe the pollen had something to do with it. The croup, not the loco-ness. Pollen counts above 130 are said to be "very high". The count hit 5700 here last week! That has to be a mistake. Today was 300 and something.

Eventually, the end of the day came and it was time to get her sister from school. We arrived and she was taking her usual time getting out of the car. I tried to hurry her along, which I seem to be doing a lot. Impatience is surely my fatal flaw. She made her way hastily to the doorway and I wasn't really watching but somehow, she managed to lose her balance and careen head first out the car and straight toward the pavement. I couldn't catch her. All I could do was stick my leg out to try to brake her fall. She bounced off my shin and tumbled to the ground. Bloody murder was screamed. Her face had smacked solidly into my leg. I did a quick check and she still had all her teeth. And none seemed too loose, although they all seemed a little loose which struck me as odd, but I had other more pressing matters. Anyway, she recovered quickly as she does. She is a tough little girl. She does have a lot of accidents these days. One of her favourite things to do is to walk or run while looking behind her. This often ends badly.

We went inside and told the story to Ms. Miosha at Georgie's class. That's when I noticed I was bleeding. My little monkey's teeth had scraped a gouge in my shin. I didn't think much of it and we carried on with our day.

The next morning the cut looked ugly. It is a little swollen and kind of oozy. The dreaded monkey bite! The girls were both very excited by this and the fact that this meant I needed a band-aid. Georgie made me promise that she could put it on but emphasized that she had no interest in removing it later.

I remember another time when I was worried about getting bitten by a monkey. Gudrun and I and our friend Nigel were standing looking at some baboons that were blocking our path. We were trying to go for a nice little hike in the Drakensburg mountains only to have our day ruined by some ill-tempered apes. Are baboons apes? Well, wherever they fit on the monkey- ape continuum, they grudgingly yielded the trail to us but hung out in the bushes nearby and grunted and growled at us with increasing intensity until we made a hasty retreat (ran away like little girls). We felt rather silly for being scared of them so tried again with similar results. They sounded even more aggressive and annoyed with us this time so we returned to the hotel. We rationalized that we had done the right thing but inside we felt like cowards. I think we told the guy at the hotel that the hike was "great". Tough sefricans like him would not understand. Nigel was concerned that a bite from one of these guys would be a bad thing as they had "dirty mouths, just like people". I was more concerned about them ripping me limb from limb. Those SOBs were big.

Anyway, I am off to put some polysporin on my monkey bite. I fear it has become gangrenous. Get the hack saw. I probably have a night of delirious dreams ahead of me.